I came out of business school from marketing (though most of my best marketing knowledge I learned through books), but also am a programmer (wrote most of our original code), graphic designer (owned a design co) and was CTO for another Internet company.
(Oh great, here goes that karma I built up. Oh well...)
Could we please just skip the redundant parts of the conversations that sping up 100% of the time when we have creationism vs. non-creationism discussions? The arcs of conversation are so predictable that you could just rehash them from the/. archive with a Python script, and no one would know the difference.
Some topics that I now view as complete noise (since we've hashed them over to death 400 times): - how stupid Christians are - how much/.'ers {loath | fear} {a theocracy | George Bush | anti-abortion activists}. - details about why creationists are wrong.
None of these topics is uninteresting, except for the fact THAT WE HAVE THE SAME CONVERSATIONS EVERY TIME A TOPIC COMES UP PITTING RELIGIOUS VIEWS VS. ATHEISTIC ONES.
Seriously, I don't even know why we kick these articles around more than once every 5 years. Because clearly they don't stimulate any new thoughts in us/.'ers.
one CIO who says 'There were some applications I had been thinking about moving to a Microsoft platform, but this has now totally alienated me from Microsoft.'"
Should someone who makes technology decisions based on his emotional reaction to Steve Balmer's FUD really be a CIO?
Why the high school teacher couldn't just say "the square root of -1" eludes me.
If that definition of "i" is good enough to satisfy you, then I think your post is more true than you even understand. There are important questions about the justification of i's definition, the validity of complex arithmetic being applied to physical world problems, etc. It sounds like the school system failed to encourage in you (as in most others) a sense of mathematical curiosity that could have served you well and given you much more pleasure in studying math. And even if you're a pragmatist, finding math pleasurable to study leads to a proficiency with pragmatic benefits as well. It's depressing that such a beautiful and philosophically interesting subject gets charred by many public school curricula.
- Maybe not all people are want the jobs that requires a high-school education.
- Maybe some people are just stupid and would rather do meaningful work then spend time being spoon-fed academic work that won't use anyway.
- Maybe it's PARENT'S faults: not holding their children to standards such as completing their homework and actually understanding the material, which in turn makes the kids' grades lower and makes them despondent about school.
- Perhaps the parents aren't being very involved and interested in the children's school work, and the kids are taking the hint from their parents regarding how important school is.
My general point: If the roles of all parties involved were clearly defined, it would be meaningful to discuss who's screwing up. But the idealized roles aren't clearly defined - there's no known single formula for successful public eduction. So it's not rational to assume the schools are the parties with the problem.
You're the cop; you NEVER need to be in an argument. You aren't asking him what he wants to do, you're telling him. Never ever let a subject think they are in control. Arguing tells the subject they have some power.
Good point. You want us all to be sheep. Even when you've made a mistake about a point of law, you're right, massah. Whatevah you say, massah. Sure I'll stop photographing you, massah. Sure I won't write down your badge number, massah. Because you don't need to accept questions about whether what you're doing is withing your authority. We have to take it from you for now, and wait months for a court date if we disagree.
I know I'm going to lose karma over this one, but I'm pissed to hear a cop talk advocate an arrogant unwillingness to hear the reasons that he may be mistaken. And I'm pissed at the reality that even when a cop is abusing someone we (including me) lack the balls to restrain the cop.
And I suppose they're too damn cheap to go back to WETA Digital for the FX too, they'll get some folks from over at Sci-Fi Channel and it'll be just fine.
I totally agree. For instance, most/. comments on this story fail to critique the validity of the test's questions or whether there was any bias in the study's selection of test-takers.
Just out of curiosity, why do you guys say "maths" when Americans typically say "math"? Are we just using different abbreviations for the word "mathematics"?
"Statistics" (2 semesters at least) and "experimental design". "Modeling and simulation" is closely related, but is somewhat covered if you take the stats and experimental design courses.
Here's why...
When starting on my PhD research, I pretty naively thought I'd just write a network simulator to try out my idea and to compare its performance to other network protocols. That would be fairly acceptable in today's CS climate, but STUPID.
People using simulators face a number of questions that they often don't ask, and therefore make their conclusions nearly meaningless. Are there specific hypotheses they're trying to test? How do they know they've performed enough simulation runs to draw conclusions at an acceptable confidence level? Exactly what is the distribution over which the inputs are randomized, and why was distribution chosen? To what extent is the model even validated (ok, this is more of a Modeling and Simulation issue than a stats issue)?
Psych and biology majors have been forced to rigorously answer these questions for a long time. We, the supposedly "mathematically superior" CS majors, have often ignored these details as though they're irrelevant. But if left un-tackled, we can produce crap research whose conclusions have little clear connection to reality. These is even true for when we can afford to do real-world tests and thus are less at the mercy of simulation model inaccuracies. How many real-world tests do we perform before we draw our conclusions? How do we randomize the inputs?
Much of today's network-related research sucks. Not because the ideas being generated are bad, but because the analysis of the new ideas and their comparison to the performance of pre-existing ideas is crap. Without taking stats and experimental design courses, even the reviewers of these papers don't realize that those weaknesses exist.
If you want your network research to be meaningful, test your ideas with meaningful experiments and analysis.
Seriously, what follows isn't meant to start a flame war at all. I'm just curious...
I notice a lot of times that when people see a behavior or physical feature in an organism, they begin stating the evolutionary reason it came about.
Isn't this a case of stating some pretty big conjecture with a tone of voice normally reserved for more certain beliefs? I mean, sure licking wounds COULD have been evolutionarily preferred because of either of the two biological reasons stated (anti-germ vs. anti-pain), but how do you go from a certain cause being plausible to believing that the cause was the actual one?
I realize that we all try to understand how new observations fit into the world views we hold, but it just seems a little strange to me to state such conjectures with the same tone of confidence as we do, say, when talking about the clear continuum of forms that exist in the fossil record.
Just when they were about to loosen their restrictions on bringing fluids onto a plain...
I can see it now: TSA gate-thug: "Sir, please spit into the garbage bag." Me: "I... haff... no.. mo... thaliva..." TSA gate-thug: "Don't get sassy with me! Spit!" Me: "I'll try... Thee? Nothing!" TSA gate-thug: "Supervisor! We've got a wet one! CODE RED!!!"
The majority I've dealt with would most definitely go ballistic, and have.
I wonder if this has anything to do with where in the country each of us lives. Where I live, Republicans get challenged a lot on our views, so some of us learn to be civil and well-reasoned and realistic. Perhaps in places where Republicans are the vast majority, individual Republicans haven't had to refine their thinking and carefully consider their views?
Yes it could, but thankfully Bush only has a couple years left and can't run for a 3rd term.
When Bush has his third term, there won't be a "run". He'll just declare a perpetual state of emergency, like Egypt did. Don't you know that the War on Terror is a *long* war?
Slashdot Mirror
(Oh great, here goes that karma I built up. Oh well...)
/. archive with a Python script, and no one would know the difference.
/.'ers {loath | fear} {a theocracy | George Bush | anti-abortion activists}.
/.'ers.
Could we please just skip the redundant parts of the conversations that sping up 100% of the time when we have creationism vs. non-creationism discussions? The arcs of conversation are so predictable that you could just rehash them from the
Some topics that I now view as complete noise (since we've hashed them over to death 400 times):
- how stupid Christians are
- how much
- details about why creationists are wrong.
None of these topics is uninteresting, except for the fact THAT WE HAVE THE SAME CONVERSATIONS EVERY TIME A TOPIC COMES UP PITTING RELIGIOUS VIEWS VS. ATHEISTIC ONES.
Seriously, I don't even know why we kick these articles around more than once every 5 years. Because clearly they don't stimulate any new thoughts in us
- Maybe not all people are want the jobs that requires a high-school education.
- Maybe some people are just stupid and would rather do meaningful work then spend time being spoon-fed academic work that won't use anyway.
- Maybe it's PARENT'S faults: not holding their children to standards such as completing their homework and actually understanding the material, which in turn makes the kids' grades lower and makes them despondent about school.
- Perhaps the parents aren't being very involved and interested in the children's school work, and the kids are taking the hint from their parents regarding how important school is.
My general point: If the roles of all parties involved were clearly defined, it would be meaningful to discuss who's screwing up. But the idealized roles aren't clearly defined - there's no known single formula for successful public eduction. So it's not rational to assume the schools are the parties with the problem.
Good point. You want us all to be sheep. Even when you've made a mistake about a point of law, you're right, massah. Whatevah you say, massah. Sure I'll stop photographing you, massah. Sure I won't write down your badge number, massah. Because you don't need to accept questions about whether what you're doing is withing your authority. We have to take it from you for now, and wait months for a court date if we disagree.
I know I'm going to lose karma over this one, but I'm pissed to hear a cop talk advocate an arrogant unwillingness to hear the reasons that he may be mistaken. And I'm pissed at the reality that even when a cop is abusing someone we (including me) lack the balls to restrain the cop.
When is it *legal* for a crowd to turn on a police officer?
Is it basically ALWAYS illegal, and the members of the crowd have to hope a judge and jury are understanding?
"Statistics" (2 semesters at least) and "experimental design". "Modeling and simulation" is closely related, but is somewhat covered if you take the stats and experimental design courses.
Here's why...
When starting on my PhD research, I pretty naively thought I'd just write a network simulator to try out my idea and to compare its performance to other network protocols. That would be fairly acceptable in today's CS climate, but STUPID.
People using simulators face a number of questions that they often don't ask, and therefore make their conclusions nearly meaningless. Are there specific hypotheses they're trying to test? How do they know they've performed enough simulation runs to draw conclusions at an acceptable confidence level? Exactly what is the distribution over which the inputs are randomized, and why was distribution chosen? To what extent is the model even validated (ok, this is more of a Modeling and Simulation issue than a stats issue)?
Psych and biology majors have been forced to rigorously answer these questions for a long time. We, the supposedly "mathematically superior" CS majors, have often ignored these details as though they're irrelevant. But if left un-tackled, we can produce crap research whose conclusions have little clear connection to reality. These is even true for when we can afford to do real-world tests and thus are less at the mercy of simulation model inaccuracies. How many real-world tests do we perform before we draw our conclusions? How do we randomize the inputs?
Much of today's network-related research sucks. Not because the ideas being generated are bad, but because the analysis of the new ideas and their comparison to the performance of pre-existing ideas is crap. Without taking stats and experimental design courses, even the reviewers of these papers don't realize that those weaknesses exist.
If you want your network research to be meaningful, test your ideas with meaningful experiments and analysis.
Seriously, what follows isn't meant to start a flame war at all. I'm just curious...
I notice a lot of times that when people see a behavior or physical feature in an organism, they begin stating the evolutionary reason it came about.
Isn't this a case of stating some pretty big conjecture with a tone of voice normally reserved for more certain beliefs? I mean, sure licking wounds COULD have been evolutionarily preferred because of either of the two biological reasons stated (anti-germ vs. anti-pain), but how do you go from a certain cause being plausible to believing that the cause was the actual one?
I realize that we all try to understand how new observations fit into the world views we hold, but it just seems a little strange to me to state such conjectures with the same tone of confidence as we do, say, when talking about the clear continuum of forms that exist in the fossil record.
Any thoughts?
Just when they were about to loosen their restrictions on bringing fluids onto a plain...
I can see it now:
TSA gate-thug: "Sir, please spit into the garbage bag."
Me: "I... haff... no.. mo... thaliva..."
TSA gate-thug: "Don't get sassy with me! Spit!"
Me: "I'll try... Thee? Nothing!"
TSA gate-thug: "Supervisor! We've got a wet one! CODE RED!!!"
"Come on, baby. I got a real bad groin injury today. Can't you help me with the pain?"
Put in plain sight: on your homepage which you submit to Google for indexing.
It's so obvious, they'd NEVER think to look there.
You don't think LAMP can handle the load of a porn site??? ;)
Until tarantula venom shows up at stores like http://mohotta.com/ :)
(Considering that they already sell "Blair's Megadeath Hot Sauce" and "Bee Sting Honey Mustard Hot Sauce".)
I, for one, welcome our new Tinkly Winkly overlords!